Spontaneous speech in Russian as a foreign language: analysis of hesitation (a case study of Chinese students speech)

The paper considers spontaneous speech in Russian as a foreign language. Its aim is to examine hesitation markers in Chinese students' spontaneous speech in the Russian language. Therefore, the object of the paper is Chinese students' spontaneous speech in Russian; the subject is different types of hesitation markers in it. Hesitation is defined as 'a pause in locution caused by necessity for a speaker to think and speak at the same time in the course of speech production rather than by syntactical construction of the phrase'. Text is produced immediately in the moment of speech, which entails problems of selecting words or continuing speech. The data was gathered in accordance with the methods developed for the Balanced Annotated Text-Catalogue as a part of the Russian Speech Corpus. Informants were selected in such a way as to keep sociological balance (gender and level of proficiency - 2 and 3), they all underwent psychological testing (EPI for Chinese native speakers) in order to find out their psychological types (extrovert, introvert or ambivert). All monologues were recorded in two communicative scenarios - description of pictures and a free talk in response to the question "How do you spend your holiday time?" The data counts 30 spontaneous texts, three from each of ten informants.